Reclaiming the best of Karl Kautsky. By James Muldoon (Jacobin, 5 January 2019). “Denounced and then lost to history, the radical Karl Kautsky’s thought still offers a compelling vision of how to democratize all aspects of our lives.”

Karl Kautsky: From pope to renegade. By Doug Enaa Greene (Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, October 25, 2018). “In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in Kautsky’s politics in both academia and on the political left.”

Kautsky: the abyss beyond parliament (Marxist Left Review, No.14, Winter 2017). “Darren Roso contributes to debates about what kind of parties the revolutionary left needs and the role of Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of the Second International before World War I.”

The enigma of Kautsky. By Marc Mulholland (Weekly Worker, Issue 1129, 3 November 2016). “[Karl Kautsky was] an original thinker, and in his life work he developed the system he had inherited.”

The roots of 1917: Kautsky, the state, and revolution in Imperial Russia. By Eric Blanc (Marxist Essays and Commentary, October 13, 2016). Also online in Weekly Worker (Issue 1128, October 27, 2016). På svensk: Rötterna till 1917 (pdf) (Marxistarkiv.se, 1. februar 2018). “This article reexamines the perspectives on the state and revolution advocated by the early Karl Kautsky and revolutionary social democrats across the Tsarist Empire.”

Party, class and Marxism: Did Kautsky advocate ‘Leninism’? By Eric Blair (Marxist Essays and Commentaries, May 24, 2016). “The article deserves a wide audience, as it clarifies the strategy of the early revolutionary Kautsky and because it insightfully challenges problematic political orientations that have become hegemonic among socialists today.”

Lenin and Kautsky: The final chapter. By Lars T. Lih (Communist Students, January 22, 2009). “Lenin felt that Kautsky had changed, not himself. He saw no reason to abandon the outlook he had shared with Kautsky just at the time when, in his eyes, events had justified it completely.”

Karl Kautsky and Marxist historiography. By Paul Blackledge (Science & Society, Vol.70, No.3, July 2006, p.337-359). “While the power of Kautsky’s Marxism became muted after this period, the weaknesses of his later works should not be allowed to obscure the insights contained within his earlier work; insights that informed some of the best work of the next generation of Marxists.” Only abstract online.

The pope of Marxism. By Dave Stocking (Permanent Revolution, No.6, 1987). Review of Dick Geary, Karl Kautsky (Manchester University Press, 1987). “Dick Geary’s book belongs, at bottom to the school of those who see no fundamental contradictions in Kautsky’s development.”

Kautskyism. Part 2:1 in: What is the real Marxist tradition? By John Molyneux (International Socialism, Issue 20, Summer 1983). “The SPD officially committed itself to Marxism at its congress at Erfurt in 1891 when it adopted the Erfurt Programme drafted by the ‘Pope of Marxism’, Karl Kautsky.”

Karl Kautsky. By Leon Trotsky (New International, Vol.5, No.2, February 1939; online at Marxists Internet Archive). “We remember Kautsky as our former teacher to whom we once owed a good deal, but who separated himself from the proletarian revolution and from whom, consequently, we had to separate ourselves.”

Litteratur:

Foto: Karl Kautsky in ‘Lederhosen’, 1904 … on a postcard written by his mother Minna Kautsky-Jaich to her daughter-in-law Luise Kautsky-Ronsperger. Sent from Vienna, August 1904. (BG A 7/208; International Institute of Social History, IISH, Amsterdam)

Litteratur:

The Soul of Man Under Socialism. By Oscar Wilde (Verso, Blog, 27 November 2018). An excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s book: “Socialism won’t just improve the material conditions of society. It will also better the souls and creative impulses of everyone in it.”